Dass's Roles in Morrison's Novel

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is filled with instances of hatred or aggression. Claudia hates her doll, Pauline hates Cholly, Cholly hates Darlene. In all these cases, however, the underlying cause of the hatred represents something else, something deeper. For example, Cholly’s hatred of Darlene was more directed at the white men that oversaw his first sexual encounter. He just had to direct his hate elsewhere, or else “hating them would have consumed him, burned him up like a piece of soft coal, leaving only flakes of ash and a question mark of smoke” (151). Morrison writes that the emotion of hating the powerful white men would have destroyed Cholly. But what does it mean to be destroyed by an emotion? The Bluest Eye shows that there are typically two reactions to such destruction; either one gives up completely or they rebuild themselves.

It isn’t necessary to analyze the characters who surrendered to their emotion like Cholly Breedlove. The real key to understanding destructive emotion is demonstrated in those characters who rebuilt themselves. Pecola Breedlove, the novel’s protagonist, saw through the role of “victim” that her mother and others in her community attached themselves to. Dass wrote in How Can I Help? about breaking through the roles of helper and helped as the key to perfect compassion. Morrison’s novel is filled with these roles. Pauline’s fascination with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow’s beauty is an instance of these roles contributing to a character’s downfall. Pauline “was never able to, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty” (122). The roles of helper and victim follow these same lines. Unless a character sees through those roles to true compassion, they will be stuck in them forever. Hence the reason Pauline’s life continued as it was while Pecola sought help from Soaphead Church. Once she got her blue eyes, she wasn’t either of those roles anymore. She wasn’t the poor, ugly Black girl who had been sexually assaulted by her father. She saw to what she wanted to be, and saw that others saw her in the same way. As false as her impressions were, Pecola’s actions demonstrate the power of breaking through the roles. Not everyone fits into a category. But it’s a conscious decision; you have to choose not to.